I knew this day would come, one day.

Finally after a few years of work Blade Kitten has been released to the wild. PlayStation owners who are up for a bit of fun can now spend some time with the vivacious Blade Kitten herself, Kit Ballard. With her cool floating sword, the Darque Blade and her cute alien thing of a sidekick Skiffy you can explore the planetoid of Hollow Wish to make your fortune. Oh and there’s some guys to fight too… that will make that sword come in pretty handy I guess.

It’s been an exciting and challenging time bringing Blade Kitten to life from idea to comic to final game reality. Working with a great team to bring the comic world to life has been a true pleasure. They’ve been totally committed to making the best Blade Kitten game they could and as a Blade Kitten expert I can safely say, without any hesitation that this is the best Blade Kitten game EVER made. OK so it’s the only Blade Kitten game ever made… that just makes it rare and even more valuable.

For the newcomers here’s what to expect, in a short single paragraph version. Obviously the actual game is much longer.

Blade Kitten is a full on classic side scrolling adventure in glorious HD. You play Kit Ballard, a catgirl Bounty Hunter on a mysterious planetoid called Hollow Wish. Kit is tracking down a local trouble maker when she’s ambushed by a rival who is after the same bounty. So you need to track down your rival then your bounty and along the way uncover the mystery that is Hollow Wish’s darkest secret. You’ll get some help from a little alien critter sidekick called Skiffy and your uber-cool floating A.I. sword, the Darque Blade. Get ready for level after level of free flowing, scrambling exploration and intuitive combat as you find make your way through this comic based adventure.

You get huge levels to explore and hunt for treasure while you kick the butts of the local tough guys. Use the in-game money to buy new blades, upgrade your health and stamina and even grab a new costume to show the world how your Blade Kitten hunts her bounties in style.

So PlayStation owners can get their hands on Blade Kitten from PlayStation Store and check out all the fun for themselves. For only £9.99/€12.99, what? There’s more than £9.99/€12.99 worth of stuff in the game… I mean there’s all the excellent voice action in the fully voiced dialogue. When you hear the spot on voices of Kelly Fuller as Kit Ballard, Dave Mitchell as Hundert Tonne or Eliza Schneider as Justice Kreel you’ll completely believe these characters, especially when you see them in the amazing cut-scenes. The cinematics alone are worth the price of admission.

Oh well too late to change that now – you get it for the cheap price.

Thanks and I hope you enjoy playing the game, I know I enjoyed making it.

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Hi there, my name is Sean Edwards and I’m a Senior Game Designer at Krome Studios Australia. In this Blog update I hope to give some interesting and candid insights into the process the team went through to build the levels for Blade Kitten.

Building the World – Level Design for Blade Kitten

Initially we went through several approaches to building the levels, but with a small team we needed a method that allowed fast experimentation and changes. Rather than model large areas of the levels which would require going back into 3DS Max and re-exporting to make changes, the method chosen was to build lots of smaller objects to allow for fast changes and experimentation. This required all the pieces to be built to very specific dimensions so that everything would snap together nicely. The final levels were assembled using those pieces in Krome’s in-house level editor ‘Merktools’ which allowed quick iteration and real time editing of the level as the game is running!

The actual process of taking the level from concept through to completion involved several steps. First the Creative Director, Steve Stamatiadis, would conceptualize the level in a very high level “mud map” format. This map included locations for all the key story elements and a basic layout.

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Hey folks, I’m Steve Stamatiadis the creator and guy to blame for Blade Kitten, a fantastic new side-scrolling action game for the PS3. No, seriously, it IS awesome. I know because it’s a story I’ve wanted to tell in game form for a great many years. So come with me and I’ll give you a little behind the scenes insight as to where this game comes from.

First up, Blade Kitten is the adventures of bounty hunter Kit Ballard, a pink haired catgirl (or Felion as they’re known in the universe). She travels around with her sidekick, Skiffy a feisty alien critter that is her companion and protector, and also her floating A.I. sword known as the Darque Blade. Her current bounty leads her to a synthetic planetoid on the outskirts of civilized space. There she’s ambushed by a rival and thus begin Kit’s adventures in the game.

Blade Kitten was born out of the need to bring together years of unused and unfinished ideas into a cool, fun universe that I could channel my creative energy into. These ideas feature all the geeky cool stuff that I loved like anime visuals, giant robots, big swords, aliens, cool fun science fiction and a serving of fun. This happened around 2001 while I was working on the first TY the Tasmanian Tiger game creating that universe. I had a lot of fun doing that but really wanted more sci-fi (though actually I ended up creeping a lot more Blade Kittenish robots into the TY universe).

You would have thought all of these different ideas wouldn’t have worked together but in fact they ended up fitting together like a big jigsaw puzzle. I guess all those projects were really just parts of the whole and maybe that’s why I could never work them out on their own. It was an exciting time realizing that it all fit together so nicely that I could proceed to the next stage, the protagonist.

So before Blade Kitten formed the previous two projects I was thinking about were at opposite ends of the spectrum – one was a too serious and the other was to silly but I really liked elements of both (they also had female leads) so I found the halfway point and that had pretty much the right amount of serious and playfulness. In the early days it was named “Kit-10″ because Kit had 10 robot gimmicks. That was a pretty dumb name but one of her robots Blade stuck around and became the Darque Blade. The idea of the robots became part of Kit’s personality; her “hobby” is mech spotting which comes in handy when you may need to fight them.

The ideas that led up to Blade Kitten. From the left Princess Pop Idol, Gun Gladiator, Kat Burglar, First Blade Kitten, Final Blade Kitten
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